Tegami Bachi has all the right ingredients to be a great shonen series: a dark, futuristic setting; rad monsters; cool weapons powered by mysterious energy sources; characters with goofy names (how’s “Gauche Suede” grab you?); and smart, stylish artwork. Unfortunately, volume one seems a little underdone, like a piping-hot shepherd’s pie filled with rock-hard carrots.
The problem lies with the story: manga-ka Hiroyuki Asada takes a simple premise and gussies it up with fussy, poorly explained details. The story itself may remind readers of Banya the Explosive Delivery Man or The Postman, as Tegami Bachi‘s principal characters are also mail carriers — or, in the series’ parlance, Letter Bees — who traverse dark wastelands to deliver letters and packages to the far-flung residents of their homeworld. In the case of Tegami Bachi, that homeworld is Amberground, a planet illuminated by a single, man-made star that hovers above its capital city, Akatsuki, where the wealthiest, most powerful citizens live. Amberground’s cities are separated by country inhabited only by Gaichuu, giant insects whose metal exoskeletons are impervious to most weapons, save the shindanjuu, or heart gun, the preferred sidearm of Letter Bees.
How, exactly, the shindanjuu works is never satisfactorily explained, despite its prominent role in the story. I had to consult the appendix, which defines “heart” as a magical, omnipresent energy that penetrates and surrounds most living beings, not unlike The Force. (The Gaichuu, lacking heart, are vulnerable to its awesome power, especially when it takes the form of hollow bullets). The shindanjuu also enables Letter Bees to experience other people’s memories in a vivid, almost hallucinatory fashion. As with the magic bullets, the gun’s dream-sharing capacity gets only a cursory explanation; the dream sequences are hella confusing, requiring several readings to figure out whose memories we’re seeing.
Tegami Bachi‘s other shortcoming is its two principal characters. Gauche Suede, the older, more experienced Letter Bee, is a stock shonen hero: a confident, tough-talking loner who turns out to be a softie under his cool, competent exterior. Lag Seeing, the younger one, begins his journey as a package — he’s one of Gauche’s deliveries — and decides to become a Letter Bee after Gauche safely guides them through Gaichuu-infested territory. Lag, too, is a familiar type, the slightly dim but very sincere Kid on a Mission who views mail delivery as his true calling. Both characters have sad back stories involving female relatives — again, a standard shonen trope that does little to enrich the story.
The artwork, on the other hand, is genuinely striking; Tegami Bachi is one of the best-looking titles in the Shonen Jump catalog. Hiroyuki Asada’s landscapes are beautifully rendered, giving a clear sense of Amberground’s geography, technology (they’re in the nineteenth-century Bavarian phase of development, to judge from the architecture), fauna, and flora. And man, what flora! In one amusing sequence, Lag fights Gaichuu in a forest of giant broccoli. Does make you wonder, though: how do those florets get so big without sunlight?
Asada makes effective use of screentone to capture Amberground’s perpetual night, reserving true black for the sky and for a few important details: Gauche’s jacket, the Gaichuu’s carapaces. He incorporates star imagery into almost every scene without it ever seeming cheesy or heavy-handed; the stars have symbolic importance, to be sure, but they also serve an artistic purpose, bringing light and contrast to a layout that might otherwise be a murky mess.
If I seem unduly harsh in my assessment of Tegami Bachi, it’s only because it has the potential to be good — really good, if Asada focuses more on character development and less on mystical hoo-ha. The premise lends itself to both a Delivery of the Week format, in which each chapter functions as a stand-alone story, and to a more traditional Boy on a Quest narrative, in which Gauche, Lag, or both set out to rescue the people they love. Either way, I’ll be picking up volume two to see if the storytelling rises to the level of the artwork.
Review copy provided by VIZ Media, LLC. Volume one will be available on September 1, 2009.
The ocean occupies a special place in the artistic imagination, inspiring a mixture of awe, terror, and fascination. Watson and the Shark, for example, depicts the ocean as the mouth of Hell, a dark void filled with demons and tormented souls, while The Birth of Venus offers a more benign vision of the ocean as a life-giving force. In Children of the Sea, Daisuke Igarashi imagines the ocean as a giant portal between the terrestrial world and deep space, as is suggested by a refrain that echoes throughout volume one:
If Phoenix is Tezuka’s Ring Cycle, Wagnerian in scope, form, and seriousness, then Dororo is Tezuka’s Don Giovanni, a playful marriage of supernatural intrigue and lowbrow comedy whose deeper message is cloaked in shout-outs to fellow artists (in this case, 
Though much of the devastation that Hyakkimaru and Dororo witness is man-made (Dororo takes placed during the Sengoku, or Warring States, Period), demons exploit the conflict for their own benefit, holding small communities in their thrall, luring desperate travelers to their doom, and feasting on the never-ending supply of human corpses. Some of these demons have obvious antecedents in Japanese folklore — a nine-tailed kitsune — while others seem to have sprung full-blown from Tezuka’s imagination — a shark who paralyzes his victims with sake breath, a demonic toad, a patch of mold possessed by an evil spirit. (As someone who’s lived in prewar buildings, I can vouch for the existence of demonic mold. Lysol is generally more effective than swordplay in eliminating it, however.) Hyakkimaru has a vested interest in killing these demons, as he spontaneously regenerates a lost body part with each monster he slays. But he also feels a strong sense of kinship with many victims — a feeling not shared by those he helps, who cast him out of their village as soon as the local demon has been vanquished.
For folks who find the cartoonish aspects of Tezuka’s style difficult to reconcile with the serious themes addressed in Buddha, Phoenix, and Ode to Kirihito, Dororo may prove a more satisfying read. The cuteness of Tezuka’s heroes actually works to his advantage; they seem terribly vulnerable when contrasted with the grotesque demons, ruthless samurai, and scheming bandits they encounter. Tezuka’s jokes — which can be intrusive in other stories — also prove essential to Dororo‘s success. He shatters the fourth wall, inserts characters from his stable of “stars,” borrows characters from other manga-kas’ work, and punctuates moments of high drama with low comedy, underscoring the sheer absurdity of his conceits… like sake-breathing shark demons. Put another way, Dororo wears its allegory lightly, focusing primarily on swordfights, monster lairs, and damsels in distress while using its historical setting to make a few modest points about the corrosive influence of greed, power, and fear.
Since childhood, Misao has been cursed with an unlucky gift: the ability to see ghosts and demons. As her sixteenth birthday approaches, however, Misao’s luck begins to change. Isayama, the star of the tennis team, asks her out, and Kyo, a childhood friend, moves into the house next door, pledging to protect Misao from harm. Kyo’s promise is quickly put to the test when Isayama turns out to be a blood-thirsty demon who’s intent on killing — and eating — Misao. Just before Isayama attacks Misao, he tells her that she’s “the bride of prophecy”: drink her blood, and a demon will gain strength; eat her flesh, and he’ll enjoy eternal youth; marry her, and his whole clan will flourish. Kyo rescues Misao, revealing, in the process, that he himself is a tengu (winged demon) who’s also jonesing for her blood. Kyo then offers her a choice: marry him or die. Actually, Kyo is less tactful than that, telling Misao, “You can be eaten, or you can sleep with me and become my bride.”
When I was applying to college, my guidance counselor encouraged me to compose a list of amenities that my dream school would have — say, a first-class orchestra or a bucolic New England setting. It never occurred to me to add “pet-friendly dormitories” to that list, but reading Yuji Iwahara’s Cat Paradise makes me wish I’d been a little more imaginative in my thinking. The students at Matabi Academy, you see, are allowed to have cats in the dorms, a nice perk that has a rather sinister rationale: cats play a vital role in defending the school against Kaen, a powerful demon who’s been sealed beneath its library for a century.
Nineteen sixty-eight was a critical year in Osamu Tezuka’s artistic development. Best known as the creator of Astro Boy, Jungle Emperor Leo, and Princess Knight, the public viewed Tezuka primarily as a children’s author. That assessment of Tezuka wasn’t entirely warranted; he had, in fact, made several forays into serious literature with adaptations of Manon Lescaut (1947), Faust (1950), and Crime and Punishment (1953). None of these works had made a lasting impression, however, so in 1968, as gekiga was gaining more traction with adult readers, Tezuka adopted a different tact, writing a dark, erotic story for Big Comic magazine: Swallowing the Earth.
Dangerous Minds, Dead Poets Society, Stand and Deliver, and To Sir, With Love all depict teachers who are heroic in their self-sacrifice, renouncing money, family ties, and even their reputations in order to inspire students. Kojiro Ishido, the anti-hero of Bamboo Blade, won’t be mistaken for any of these noble educators. He’s bankrupt, morally and financially, and so eager to dig himself out of debt that he’d exploit his students in a heartbeat.
Though its name evokes images of the White House — and maybe even the unctuous Josiah Bartlett — The History of the West Wing is, in fact, an adaptation of a twelfth-century play by the Moliere of China, Wang Shifu.